WiMax Antenna With Auto-positioning System

[Andrew] certainly brings a bit of a James Bond feel to connecting to your WiMax base station. He built this antenna along with an auto-positioning system to get the strongest signal possible. The device, which appears a bit fragile, breaks down into a nice little case. When you get to your next checkpoint you can set it up and the stepper motor along with an ATtiny2313 will rescan to get you on with your mission as fast as possible. This is one of our favorite antenna builds so far, and we’ve seen a lot of hacked antennas. Don’t miss the action-packed trailer after the break.

I’d guess that it’s optimizing RSSI. I’m not 100% sure that’s necessarily optimal for a system that implements MIMO. I’m also curious about cell edge performance, where optimizing RSSI in a system with N=1 reuse might just mean it’s picking up signal from 2 base stations and effectively maximizing interference.

Well, I have created this little thing for usage mostly outdoors, with only one BS around. Out of town, I don’t have a really big choice, since the territory officially does not have any network coverage. But ofcourse it is best to work tuned onto one BS, with no switching.
While now, the algo is quite simple – I just check the output of madwimax and try to find the angle with the best CINR. I will carry more tests later this month, and perhaps switch to a logoperiodic instead of a biquad.

I built one just like this 5 years ago for wifi sniffing by following some guide. Dunno what’s the exact name of this antenna, maybe fragile as u said but this was definitely not a good solution for 802.11b/g.

Matter of fact this antenna screwed up the signal instead of helping to get to far distances.